The Tao of Hoop: On the Transformational Practice of Hula-Hooping (Seriously, Though)

By Ann Humphreys

The Tao of Hoop is a philosophical memoir about how the humble hula-hoop transformed one woman's life...but, seriously, though! Ann Humphreys was not aware that she didn't understand how to feel--something we don't learn about in school--until she very randomly (through cr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Line&Circle
• Release date: Jan 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737639817

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©Ann Humphreys, 2021

PRINT: 978-1-7376398-0-0

EBOOK: 978-1-7376398-1-7

AUDIOBOOK: 978-1-7376398-2-4

Some names have been changed to protect privacy.

IN MEMORIAM

James E. Humphreys, Jr.

Kimowan Metchewais

Burning Dan Gordon-Levitt

and for

Tommie

Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.

— Galileo

God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

— Liber Philosophorum XXIV

Preface

The Point

The way to do is to be.

— Lao Tzu

This is one of those goofy spiritualesque self-help-ish memoir books written by some overeducated weirdo still living in a college town. The reason this book exists is that the hula-hoop changed my life. The hula-hoop changed my life because it taught me how to feel. It taught me how to feel through its insistently concrete touch on my body at the place where its form found rotation in relationship to my body’s sense of the forces that shape spacetime. It taught me that feeling (a phenomenon I experience within and throughout my body) and thought (the act of speaking about such experiences to myself) are not one in the same thing. I had never understood that before. I was 36 years old.

The hula-hoop taught me through the place where it touched my body: a distinct ovoid patch of polypropylene along the hoop’s inner wall that certain old-school hoopers call the Point. The Point of the hoop is the place where it is in active, revolving contact with a living, moving human body.

Through repeated interaction with the hoop’s Point, a hooper may derive an evolvingly accurate awareness of the position—at any given moment—of both the entire hoop and the entire body. And through continued practice, across weeks and months and years, a hooper may find herself in possession of an entirely new metaphor through which to perceive the immense flowing implausibility into which she has—out of all the infinite things that could ever be imagined to be possible—been born.

Luckily, there is no reason for you or anyone to take this book seriously on any level, because I have already established that I am a loony, intense, oversharing circus freak who actually believes that dancing with a plastic ring significantly illuminated the meaning behind the philosophy called Taoism—a philosophy I needed very desperately, despite being fully ignorant of this need for the first half of my adult life. I was ignorant because I hated religion. I hated religion because I had lost mine. And if there was anything I hated as much as religion, it was hula-hooping.

I hated hula-hooping with an ugly, inordinate, smoldering contempt. I hated it because I—perhaps like you—just could not do it. I didn’t know how. And I didn’t know how to learn. And I didn’t want to. And I didn’t care. Like, in any way, at all.

Until, you know—until there was this hot guy.

I.

June, 2005

I feel dead. I would rather be dead. If it weren’t for my precious black-brown pit mix, Vincent, I would have no reason to want to be alive. I am out walking him in the midday heat, which is the only thing I ever feel capable of doing apart from going to work, taking showers, chain-smoking cigarettes, and getting wasted on pale ale.

This is not a reflection of reality. This is just how I feel. I have a great home, many great friends, and a great job as a mitigation investigator in death-penalty appeals cases. I spend a lot of time driving to weird townships all over the state and interviewing people, which is something I excel at. I excel at it because I am truly interested in every story every person tells me. And they can feel it; they can tell I really want to know, to understand their experiences. So they always tell me a lot.

What I don’t have…any longer…is a boyfriend. He dumped me, utterly without ceremony, exactly six months ago. I had just returned from a weekend trip to D.C. He came out to the driveway to meet me when I pulled in. Aww, he really must have missed me! I thought gooily, jumping out of the car to hug his tall, lank frame. On the very short trip between the car and the front door, he spun around suddenly to face me and blurted: I’m moving out! I realized later he had had to tell me before I got in the house and saw the black line of all his packed suitcases, waiting just inside the front door.

Ever since then, I have been caught in a Groundhog Day warp, living and reliving and reliving the same day. I wake late, my throat thick with mucus from having chain-smoked the night before. Flooded with a ferocious disgust for myself, the thoughts begin to swarm in. He’s gone. He left me. Why did he leave me? How could he leave me? He loved me. I know he loved me. He loves me. I know he loves me. He was just here on Friday! The disgust thickens into nausea as I pick up my crappy, work-issue Nokia phone and note—with horror—how many calls and texts there are from the night before. All from me to him. He hasn’t answered a single one.

9:06 p.m.: What r u up to tonight?

10:15 p.m.: I’m home if u want to come over

10:48 p.m.: Vincent says hi

11:24 p.m.: Outgoing Call

12:08 a.m.: Outgoing Call

12:28 a.m.: Why won’t you answer me?

1:04 a.m.: Please just answer me

1:53 a.m.: Please…

Every two or three weeks, he will relent, and spend a night with me. In the morning light, his face looks like a carved wooden mask. He feels nothing. Why??!!!? In my heart there is an unquellable, panicked rage that makes no sense. HOW?!?!?? How did this happen??!! He was here, we lived together, we have a dog! Why did he leave? Who is he seeing? The nights when I call and call, I imagine his phone buzzing on the nightstand, over and over and over again. Her (who????) asking, Is everything okay? My guts clench. The fucking humiliation. The pointless fury, fists swinging into empty air. Him picking up the phone, the garish blue light cupping his face in the dark. The tight look of exasperation as he clicks the ringer to off and sets the phone, face down, on the floor. Don’t worry. It’s nothing.

I am nothing

I am no one

I do not exist

This lunatic shitshow is, sadly, not new to me. This is actually my third post-breakup meltdown. The last two times, the unbearable feelings eventually just faded out. Each time, it took about a year and a half. I’m only six months in this time. And I have a shrink—a smart one, finally. Yet, this time it seems somehow worse. I seem to have less self-control. The minute I leave work, I buy a six-pack. I smoke steadily while sitting on my porch consuming beer. I call friends. They listen to me tremulously recount the latest installment about the ex. They allow me to cry. It’s only been six months. They remember the last two times. They are hoping my agonized mania will wear off, like it did before. But it shows no sign of abating.

My two obligations—my job and my dog—keep me from degenerating entirely into an apparition of nothingness. Otherwise I might never leave my porch, where I sit and smoke and drink and brood on my pain. Why can’t I feel better? Why can’t I feel different? What did I do wrong? Why did he leave me? He loved me. There’s something wrong with me. Why do I care? Why can’t I be with him? If I could just be with him. If he would just let me. I can calm down. I’m calm! I didn’t do anything wrong! Why did he leave me? The questions flit around ceaselessly. They never land. They just buzz and shiver and press against my awareness, demanding my attention. I must understand. I must understand how this has happened. But as days and weeks and months go by, still I understand nothing.

Vincent pulls eagerly on his stretchy red leash. He’s ecstatic to finally be out walking. The tips of his brownblack ears bob merrily as he prances forth. This tiny motion is the one thing I currently feel able to live for.

Bright needles of pain pierce me from behind my forehead. I haven’t had coffee yet. I’m unable to make coffee at home—unless I’m drunk, taking a shower, or asleep, I can’t bear to be in the house alone for more than a few minutes.

We are heading to the co-op, a community grocery store that serves as the town’s de facto piazza. Everyone in town seems to stop by the co-op at least once a day. It’s a hippie haven in the South, where you can find fresh-ground almond butter, organic apples, textured vegetable protein, nutritional yeast. There’s also a café with a salad and hot bar. In front of the co-op is a large mulchy yard festooned with green picnic tables. A couple of times a week, from early spring to late summer, bands will set up and play on the lawn, and half the town shows up. Parents spread Indian-print blankets over the mulch and drink wine from paper cups, passing cut-up cheese and grapes to their pleasantly rumpled children, who dart through the crowd and raise clouds of dust with their unrestrained dancing. No band today—just the weekday lunch crowd. I’m sure some friends of mine are sitting amongst them. I make a plan to tie Vincent to a side table and duck inside without seeing anyone. But something catches my eye.

There’s someone dancing, alone, in the middle of the lawn. It’s a guy. A rangy, dark-haired guy. He just seems to be…dancing, all by himself, with no music, in the middle of the dusty clearing. How weird is that. I realize with a start that I recognize him; he’s been coming here every day for breakfast for the last few weeks. And he is…I now notice…really...kinda hot. He looks like an early version of Robert Downey Jr: olive skin, straight dark hair, sharp jawline. I have speculated that he’s visiting from L.A.; he doesn’t look or act like a local guy. He wears mirrored shades and tight-fitting hats and is always talking on a cell phone. I’ve imagined him as a young cutting-edge entrepreneur with business deals simmering everywhere. But…why...is he out here...dancing?

Somehow, I can’t pull my eyes from him. He’s turning, like a Sufi dervish, around and around and around. His movements are unexpectably graceful and beautiful; he seems to be in some kind of trance. That’s when I notice that around him, there is suspended a shape—a black, curving, unending line…a circle. He turns with it; he seems to follow it. He pushes it gently with his body, turning with it through space…with his forearm he lifts it up, into the air, for a single rotation…then—with effortless grace—he sets it back down onto his body. I can’t stop staring at him. I mean, what the hell…? He’s, like, dancing with this, this…THING, it seems so odd…I can’t move, I’m staring at him, at the shape around him, the black line that keeps on moving, rotating, revolving…and all at once I realize that this guy, this cute-as-hell, totally too-cool-looking guy, whirling all by himself in the middle of this public space, he is…the guy is…oh my god…he’s actually…hula-hooping!

And for the first time in six grim and long months, my heart and mind heave themselves up out of the dark and terminal cave of loss, and fly like birds toward the seeable truth that is beauty.

II.

Current

"We dance around in a ring and suppose

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

— Robert Frost

Once the hoop is in flight—once the Point is rotating around and around and around some part (usually the waist) of a living, thinking, moving human body—the hoop might be described, by certain old-school hoopers, as having a Current.

What the hoop’s Current communicates is Flow: the inescapable fact that a hoop in motion is different from a hoop that is resting against the wall. A hoop in motion has an axis: an irreducible center line running vertically through the body, around which the hoop organizes its rotation. This line is purely imaginary: it is something that is felt—sensed—by the innate intelligence of the body. It cannot be observed or measured by the instruments we might use to measure particles or valences or thermodynamics or gravity or any thing we may assert